Saturday, August 30, 2014

I think most people assume flap copy isn’t
necessarily the author’s writing. While it can include author input, it could also
be an editor, copywriter, publicist or some combination thereof.Flap copy is a particular animal, and
wouldn’t spring to mind as the first choice for an example of the ‘author’s
voice’.Plus, if you want readers to
believe you’d actually read a particular book, you might crack it open and
select an exemplary sentence or two from the interior, rather than the promo
blurb from Amazon.

In his recent book, Free To Learn, Peter Gray, a psychology
professor at Boston College, argues that “children come into this world burning
to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct
their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model
originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.”

In Free to
Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that…Children come
into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and
sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts
in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual
growth.

The selected bits appear in quotes in McLaren’s piece, suggesting they’re
written by Gray and come from the body of his book.No quotes surround the same selection in the
blurb.

Here it is again on Boing
Boing - along with an excerpt which includes a sentence
beginning, “Children come into this world burning to learn…”, though in the
actual excerpt (reproduced below the advertisement), the remainder of the sentence is different.

Is it unreasonable to expect a highly paid columnist in a paper like The
Globe to choose a passage that demonstrates they’ve read a book - rather than the
promo text?